GOV Response

• President Johnson responded favourably to feminist lobbying with a 1967 executive order banning gender discrimination by federal contractors
• NOW monitored enforcement fighting over 1,000 discrimination cases and winning $13 million back pay for women by 1971
• Democratic-controlled Congress was sympathetic to women's demands
• Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibits sex discrimination in educational institutions receiving federal funds
• Both houses of Congress agreed to the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in that year
• Nixon opposed ERA and abortion
• Nixon vetoed the 1971 Child Development Act which would have established the national system of childcare centres for poor working mothers that feminists had long sought
• Nixon believed women should stay at home and feared the cost of the system
• Nixon recognised gender inequality was increasingly important political issues and worried that 3.5% of people who were appointed to office were women and did nothing to stop the EEOC taking enforcement increasingly seriously
• The Supreme Court was supportive of women's rights in rulings - Weeks vs Southern Bell and Reed vs Reed 1971
• The Supreme Court ruled that Idaho's insistence that 'males must be preferred to females' with regard to the administration of the estates of the deceased was unconstitutional and the laws differentiating men and women had to be 'reasonable not arbitrary'